Electric power is generally transmitted from generation plants to end users (residential, commercial, and industrial (C&I), etc.) via a transmission and distribution grid consisting of a network of power stations, transmission circuits, and substations interconnected by powerlines. Once at the end users, electricity can be used as energy to power any number of devices.
The Common Information Model (CIM) is an International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard which facilitates and simplifies information exchange (such as configuration, topology, status of an electrical network, etc.) amongst various applications. The standard utilizes a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model to define a common vocabulary and basic ontology for aspects of the electric power industry. The central package within the CIM is the “wires model” which describes the basic components used to transport electricity.
CIM can be used to derive “design artifacts” as needed for the integration of related application software (e.g., Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema, Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema). Various additional standards may be used with CIM to provide energy management systems, outage management systems, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), planning, and optimization. In addition, other models (standards) may be used for grid visualization, planning, operations, and simulations.
Similarly, the Substation Configuration Description Language (SCL) is a language and representation format used for the configuration of electrical substation devices, such as for representation of modeled data and communication services.
Notably, however, CIM and SCL provide only limited communication architecture support. Moreover, existing tools, primarily for visualization, do not support any computer (Internet Protocol) network configuration or provisioning.